Scale-Out With Isilon At Rackspace

Data is at the heart of your business. As your business grows, your data grows. And with increasing amounts of data, you need a scalable, secure and efficient platform to store it. You also need reliability and performance in a storage platform that will grow with you. Today, we add a new solution to our Dedicated Storage portfolio that will not only scale-out easily, but will also do it simply and seamlessly – EMC Isilon[1].

EMC Isilon is a scale-out NAS storage solution designed to provide a powerful, simple and reliable platform for enterprise customers wanting to consolidate data and applications exceeding 100 TB. Rackspace provides support for the EMC Islion NL400 (for high density and efficiency, with massive capacity capabilities) and X400 (for large capacity and high performance) models.

The Isilon platform:

Supports up to 144 nodes and 16PB of usable (20 PB of raw) file-based storage per cluster – allowing you to massively scale-out your capacity and maintain flexibility in your storage environment

Supports NAS and Hadoop file-level protocols (SMB/CIFS, NFS and HDFS) – allowing you to choose the most suitable protocol to help simplify your workload and increase the operational flexibility of your storage

Provides simple storage management – scaling capacity and performance with each node from a single file system and a single volume

Efficiently does it all! – ensuring efficient use of your budget by providing a storage utilization rate of over 80 percent.

In addition to supporting the Isilon platform, Rackspace provides support for the following EMC data protection and data management features: SyncIQ[2]™, SnapshotIQ[3]™, SmartPools[4]™, SmartQuotas[5]™ and SmartConnect[6]™.

How can you use the EMC Isilon platform?
EMC Isilon is suitable for a number of use cases, but it is ideal for NAS fileshares, home directories, content libraries, media streaming and Big Data, to name a few.

For NAS fileshares and home directories, Isilon can help eliminate file server sprawl by providing you with the means to consolidate your organization’s data all in one place, with a single namespace. It also improves management through automated processes that balance internal workloads and capacities, while providing automated tiering via EMC’s SmartPools feature to optimize your storage performance.

In the case of content libraries and media streaming, Isilon helps simplify the management of your content by allowing you to use a single volume, a single file system and a single namespace for active and archived data. It also quickly scales to increased capacity to accommodate your ever-growing repositories of content.

For Big Data solutions, Isilon supports native integration of HDFS, Hadoop’s distributed file system protocol, allowing you to combine scale-out NAS technology with the Hadoop open source software framework to provide a data-intensive, highly scalable Big Data analytics solution. It also easily integrates multiple protocols, simplifying data integration across different applications and workloads. Data analysis is also simplified by reducing the need for manual data movement.

EMC Isilon rounds everything out by ensuring data protection through built-in resiliency-supporting software. You can use SyncIQ to replicate and distribute your data to our multiple data center locations around the world, and SnapshotIQ to reliably preserve your data in snapshots, as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Where can you get more information?
For more information about EMC Isilon at Rackspace, contact a member of our sales team, or if you are already customer, contact your Account Manager or Business Development Consultant.

We will also be at EMC World in Las Vegas from May 6 to May 9. Make sure to stop by our booth to meet the team and learn more.